Thursday, 29 March 2012

Veteran author Ian Skidmore is a staunch believer in equal opportunity … his love-hate relationships with England and Wales are of admirable egality.

Blatant bias he reserves exclusively for pipsqueak bureaucracy, which in English he might describe as ‘codswallop’ but in Welsh as ‘lol’, coincidentally reflecting in lower-case internet upper-case LOL, newspeak for ‘Laugh Out Loud’.

And Laugh Out Loud is what his newly released BeWrite Books e-novel Island Fling is all about … sheer, rolllocking hilarity from start to fin, as Welsh islanders – in Celtic high dudgeon – cheekily challenge the might of Great Britain in an all out bid for uncompromising independence (a state which Skidmore personally enjoys and used in countless millions of words to keep readers and radio show fans in thoughts and chuckles for several decades).

In Westminster, more than tea is stirred when Daffyd takes a fling with his sling at Goliath and the ‘cachu’ (use your imagination or a Welsh-English dictionary) hits the fan. But that serves ’em right. Let them sue!

(WARNING: To avoid the attention of men in white coats, it is recommended that Island Fling not be read in waiting rooms at dentists’ or psychotherapists’ clinics. Also, for the tranquility of mind of others, please to not attempt to read Island Fling in crowded buses or in first class commuter rail carriages. Turbulence in planes can be reduced by application of duct tape over the mouth. Reading in the street could cause collapse and subsequent trip-over injury to other pedestrians. BeWrite Books’ insurance does not cover the consequences of irresponsible reading.)

So here’s what the cover notes tell us of Island Fling:

***

Touchy people are lords of Welsh manors – and Huw ap Gryffydd is the touchiest of all. For him, it’s not the last straw that breaks the camel’s back, but the first.

So when the Her Majesty’s Royal Mail has the effrontery to replace the names of the tiny but proud and ancient Welsh islands of Yns Becod and Yns Tad with mere postal zip codes, enough is enough, already.

And before the hapless British Prime Minister can even make any gargling attempt to say, ‘Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch,’ ap Gryffydd whips his 2,000 colourful islanders into a Celtic frenzy.

They make a Unilateral Declaration of Independence from the mainland and vow to stand, man, woman, child and Druid against any threat to their autonomy.

Centuries earlier the Romans sensed the power and peril of the wrath of the sleeping Welsh dragon, trembled in their togas, and left well enough alone. But those in Westminster’s corridors of power are too cocky for their own good, and rather than just go home for a nice cup of tea and a lie down as Caesar did, they lay plans to force the rebel islands back into line ... and abysmally underestimate what’s in store for their task force across a short stretch of sea.

Can Squire Huw and his makeshift defence brigade of wily Welsh defeat the might of the English so that the British become two islands short of being Great Britain ever again?

Skidmore’s Island Fling rolls swiftly from giggles to laughs to side-splitting hilarity as the Islanders lay their peculiar plans ... and those at Number Ten Downing Street, London desperately try every trick in the book (and some that aren’t in the book) to recapture the two little dots on their map, save face and keep upper lips stiff.

***

Author Ian Skidmore

One of Britain’s last great eccentrics, author Ian Skidmore has thirty books under his impressively lengthy belt – many of them best-sellers. He was also one of the most widely-read newspaper columnists and radio show presenters in the UK. After thirty years with BBC Wales, he was awarded by them the coveted Golden Microphone Award … and then fired a month later when BBC bureaucrats discovered he was English!

Skidmore’s sequel to Island Fling, The Magnificent Evan, will be released by BeWrite Books this summer. His outrageously funny Forgive us Our Press Passes about his days in newspapers is already available from BeWrite Books in OUR BOKSHOP SECTION HERE and all other major online bookstores.

Over the coming months, BeWrite Books will be re-publishing much of Skidmore’s now out-of-print novels … and all new work, freshly produced in his NINTH decade of brightening the planet with wit, wisdom and belly laughs will now be exclusively in BeWrite Books ebooks editions. All author royalty he donates directly to charities.

And free mini-book brochures of Island Fling and Forgive Us Our Press Passes – including cover, book notes, author biography and picture, reviews and generous extract are instantly available to read right now HERE and HERE. Be sure to check into the author’s Saturday blog column at Skidmore's Island ... if you dare!

Artist John jensen

Cover art is by another revered and award-wining vet, the famously fun John Jensen, who has illustrated more than seventy books and whose brilliant cartoons – displaying wit, wisdom, art and a healthy dose of irreverence – have appeared in major newspapers and magazines all over the world for more than half a decade. Find out more about the colourful Jensen and check out some of his gallery of giggles at JOHN’S WEBSITE.

Island Fling is now available direct from the BeWrite Books BOOKSTORE, all major online retailers and in all digital formats for all electronic reading platforms from PCs and laptops, through the full range of dedicated ebook-reading devices and tablets to iPods and smart phones.

Love-struck Bart can’t get that into focus until he follows her from Australia on her flimsily excused trip to Europe and becomes embroiled in an obscure web of international organized crime, deception and murder.

Minnie’s a fake. Her humdrum job as a computer programmer, her deceptively carefree style and her passionate affair with Bart merely provide a plausible front for her sinister role as key player in a ring of ruthless museum raiders and smugglers of priceless artifacts.

Bart tries to take charge in a lover’s fierce hope to reform her on a dash around some of Europe’s most colorful port cities that becomes a frantic race for life itself, with deadly danger throwing its shadow at every twist and turn.

Fast moving yet poignant, Camera Obscura is one hapless man’s struggle with obsessive love that competes with a million-dollar crime empire: a search for meaning and belonging, thwarted by everyday happenstance and misfortune.

As in her previous novels ‘Death in Malta’ and ‘According to Luke’, the characters in ‘Camera Obscura’ become as real as Dingli’s meticulously researched locations. True paintings, stamps, and rare antiquarian books delicately spice pages that seem to turn in the wind as her breakneck-speed story keeps the reader in chair-edge suspense, right up to a startlingly unforeseen and unforgettable climax. NM

A plot as convoluted as the winding streets of Malta; a breath of the Mediterranean from various venues; two people – one abandoned, one exploited – searching for a primal need: the love of a father. And each, in his own way, finding it.

Particularly telling are the author’s descriptions: “Their red tail lights tunneled away through the narrow street,” and “He needed silence: he needed noise;” and, “… he spoke into the square ahead of him, the words entering the narrow street before him, ahead of the clatter of his feet.” Lovely, graceful sketches, each with a definite edge, intrigue the reader at every turn.

Reading such lines is very much like wading into a pond and stepping into an unexpected hollow, over one’s head, into depths never imagined. Dingli’s use of language does not impede the flow of her story; rather, it lends richness to the narrative, calling upon sensory and philosophical reader-identification that propels the story forward on several multilayered levels.

A sophisticated, smart, and deeply engaging novel that should attract readers everywhere.

Simon Lang (Simon Lang is the nom de plume of acclaimed US author and script writer Darlene Artell Hartman)

***

Camera Obscura is available in print and ebook editions now from all major online bookstores. A free thirty-page mini-book brochure including cover, book notes, reviews, author biography and picture, and a generous extract can be read, downloaded or printed out HERE.

Rosanne Dingli, who has a personal blog, is the award-winning author of six collections of short stories. Her previous novels – each published by BEWRITE BOOKS – are Death in Malta and According to Luke. They are available in print and ebook editions everywhere and details and free mini-book brochures are at the BeWrite Books BOOKSTORE.

Author Rosanne Dingli

Born in Malta and extensively traveled, full-time author Rosanne is dedicated to the thorough historical and location research that pepper her spell-binding work to add that vital dash of irrefutable authenticity. She now lives in Western Australia.

Thursday, 15 March 2012

BeWrite Books author Peter Tomlinson aimed to write a gritty thriller to build upon his early military experiences. But how does a writer make such a dramatic switch from a lifetime of poetry and the subtle philosophical messages of his intriguing and on-going historical fantasy series, The Petronicus Legacy?

Peter found the perfect solution to the very real character shift every author must make before creating and identifying with new characters to populate a different type of story ... he made notes, corrections and revision updates to every draft of Brotherly Love in the Morse Code he used during his army days as a signalman!

“A bit like method acting, I suppose,” Peter said. “I had to find a way of keeping in character as I wrote. If you’ll excuse the pun, Morse was the key.”

And it worked. If his name wasn’t on its striking cover, it would be hard to believe that this high-octant action novel – released today by BeWrite Books – was from his pen.

Here’s what Brotherly Love is all about:

***

‘Brotherly Love’ is the mighty flagship of the renowned Mercy Fleet, financed by one of the richest men on earth to bring emergency relief and medical aid to crippled countries ravaged by poverty, drought, famine and disease ... at least that’s what the world believes.

But love and mercy are far from the true mission of the ‘Brotherly Love’ and its renowned angelic armada. And aged multi-billionaire Vival – internationally praised for his philanthropy – is anything but a selfless humanitarian.

Nearing retirement, Ralph Collingwood has his quiet life in a peaceful English village torn apart when he’s ordered by British intelligence bosses on a last desperate international assignment ... to risk his life in a bid to expose what the cargo of the ‘Brotherly Love’ really is ... misery, torture and death ... and the Mercy Fleet’s sinister mission ... to rip civilization asunder.

Tomlinson’s race-paced thriller spans the wild seas and desolate peaks of the world and of the human spirit as actual brotherly love strives to expose Vival and his Mercy Fleet’s sinister plans for the horrendous evil they are. NM

***

Author Peter Tomlinson

Peter, who now lives in rural Shropshire, England with his astute and eagle-eyed beta-reading wife, Margaret, draws on his Merseyside roots and colorfully varied life as telegraph boy, soldier, teacher, fencing instructor, mountaineer and overseas cultural guide in his latest novel.

He said: “After the gentler style of poetry and – although the books are filled with action and adventure – The Petronicus Legacy, adjusting to a military theme was daunting. But I’ve never lost my passion for Morse over the years, and when I decided to revert to the code for draft manuscript revisions, it took me right back to early post-war years on Cyprus and the memories and tensions of that time were re-kindled and became crystal clear. Even some of the characters in my book are based on old pals I remember from sixty years ago. Quite a thrill.”

Brotherly Love is now available at the BEWRITE BOOKS BOOKSTORE and at all major international ebook retail stores in all digital formats for reading on all electrical platforms from PCs and laptops through the full range of e-ink reading devices and tablets to smart phones and iPods.

You can also download a twenty-five-page mini ebook brochure of the book, including cover, author biography and picture, and a generous extract HERE.

The Petronicus Legacy is also available in print and ebook editions at all major online stores and also in a 50%-off three-book e-omnibus. The fourth book in The Petronicus Legacy series, The Life of Nistal, is to be released later this year. There’s a free seventy-page mini-ebook brochure for the entire collection so far, including book notes and an excerpt from each book HERE.

Thursday, 8 March 2012

Popular BeWrite Books author John Bray is triple-qualified to have written today’s new release, Code Name: Caleb…

He is a dedicated and expert researcher into the American Civil War; as a former under-cover cop, he has long and first-hand experience of secret infiltration techniques and their deadly dangers; and now, as a full-time author, he displays the talent it takes to write up a storm!

Code Name: Caleb is the sequel to his gripping Ballad of Johnny Madigan in which penniless Johnny lied about his age to become a Union Army soldier, survives horrific injury in the last of the war’s bloodiest battles in which he fought, and is then recruited by the secret service to risk his life out of uniform … as a spy. Read about The Ballad of Johnny MadiganHERE.

In Code Name: Caleb, Johnny – older than his years, but much younger than believed by the army, battle-hardened and now a master of espionage – is sent back to New York to penetrate an underground counterfeiting gang supplying forged US currency to the enemy South.

His assignment takes him to Canada where a murderous Confederate spy ring is plotting an armed uprising to take over New York City and hold it hostage.

Johnny’s dream is to return to childhood sweetheart, Deidre, who kept his hope alive when he was a destitute youth in the city’s slums, but there is more than the daily risk of sudden death keeping him from her as he enters the very heart of the conspiracy.

Suspected by some plotters, he is seduced by a beautiful woman – herself a key member of the gang – whose orders are to expose him as a Northern agent.

Will the war-toughened, but still romantically naïve, Johnny see through sexy Letitia’s love ploy to complete and survive his vital mission and to be re-united with Deidre, or can the conspirators lower his guard with Letitia’s wily help, make their bold, history-changing plan succeed … and see Johnny dead?

Bray’s immaculately researched and race-paced 'Code Name: Caleb' thrusts the reader into the murky depths of intrigue, plot and counter-plot that became the dark underside of the War Between the States.

Author John A. Bray

John Bray is a seventeen-year NYPD vet, who retired as a lieutenant attorney prosecutor and took early retirement to practice as a crime lawyer before becoming a full-time fiction writer and Civil War researcher. He knows what makes the man who is code-named Caleb.

And John is also author of BeWrite Books’ The Confidential, the first of a series featuring intriguingly-flawed anti-hero Dante Falconieri, a police detective who lives in the murky shadows, assigned to the dirtiest undercover job of all … trapping fellow cops on the take from crime lords. Read about it and download the free brochure HERE.

Code Name: Caleb is now available in all digital editions for all electronic reading platforms (from PCs and laptops, through the full range of ebook readers and tablets to smart phones and iPods) at all major online ebook stores.

It is also available direct from the BeWrite Books Bookstore HERE, and you can download a free mini-ebook brochure, with cover, book notes, author biography and picture, and chapter one HERE.

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